Module 2: Core Azure Services Flashcards
What is a geographical area on the planet containing at least one, but potentially multiple datacenters that are in close proximity and networked together with a low-latency network?
Region
What are some examples of a region?
West US, Canada Central, West Europe, Australia East, and Japan West
Name some characteristics of a region.
- Regions provide customers the flexibility and scale needed to bring applications closer to their users.
- Regions preserve data residency and offer comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers.
- Some services or virtual machine features are only available in certain regions, such as specific virtual machine sizes or storage types.
What are some characteristics of a region pair?
- Physical isolation. When possible, Azure prefers at least 300 miles of separation between datacenters in a regional pair, although this isn’t practical or possible in all geographies. Physical datacenter separation reduces the likelihood of natural disasters, civil unrest, power outages, or physical network outages affecting both regions at once.
- Platform-provided replication. Some services such as Geo-Redundant Storage provide automatic replication to the paired region.
- Region recovery order. In the event of a broad outage, recovery of one region is prioritized out of every pair. Applications that are deployed across paired regions are guaranteed to have one of the regions recovered with priority.
- Sequential updates. Planned Azure system updates are rolled out to paired regions sequentially (not at the same time) to minimize downtime, the effect of bugs, and logical failures in the rare event of a bad update.
- Data residency. A region resides within the same geography as its pair (except for Brazil South) to meet data residency requirements for tax and law enforcement jurisdiction purposes.
What is a discrete market typically containing two or more regions that preserves data residency and compliance boundaries?
Geography
What are some characteristics of a geography?
- Geographies allow customers with specific data-residency and compliance needs to keep their data and applications close.
- Geographies ensure that data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and resiliency requirements are honored within geographical boundaries.
- Geographies are fault-tolerant to withstand complete region failure through their connection to dedicated high-capacity networking infrastructure.
Geographies are broken up into what locations?
Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
Describe some availability options.
- A single virtual machine with premium storage has an SLA of 99.9%. You can quickly migrate existing virtual machines to Azure through “lift and shift”. Lift and shift is a no-code option where each application is migrated as-is providing the benefits of the cloud without the risks or costs of making code changes.
- By placing virtual machines in an availability set you protect against datacenter failures and increases the SLA to 99.95%.
- Adding virtual machines to availability zones protects from entire datacenter failures and increases the SLA to 99.99%. This is highest level of protection that is provided.
- For multi-region disaster recovery region pairs protects and provides data residency boundaries.
What is one way for you to ensure your application remains online if a high-impact maintenance event is required, or a hardware a failure occurs?
Availability Sets
When a maintenance event occurs (such as a performance update or critical security patch applied to the host), the update is sequenced through what?
Update domains
What are fault domains?
Fault domains provide for the physical separation of your workload across different hardware in the datacenter. This includes power, cooling, and network hardware that supports the physical servers located in server racks. In the event the hardware that supports a server rack becomes unavailable, only that rack of servers would be affected by the outage.
Physically separate locations within an Azure region that use availability sets to provide additional fault tolerance. are called what?
Availability zones
What are some availability zone features?
- Each availability zone is an isolation boundary containing one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking.
- If one availability zone goes down, the other continues working.
- The availability zones are typically connected to each other through very fast, private fiber-optic networks.
- Availability zones allow customers to run mission-critical applications with high availability and low-latency replication.
- Availability zones are offered as a service within Azure, and to ensure resiliency, there’s a minimum of three separate zones in all enabled regions.
What is a resource group?
A resource group is a unit of management for your resources in Azure. You can think of your resource group as a container that allows you to aggregate and manage all the resources required for your application in a single manageable unit.
True or False: When you delete a resource group you delete all the resources contained within it.
True.
What are some consideration when managing resource groups?
- Each resource must exist in one, and only one, resource group.
- A resource group can contain resources that reside in different regions.
- You decide how you want to allocate resources to resource groups based on what makes the most sense for your organization.
- You can add or remove a resource to a resource group at any time.
- You can move a resource from one resource group to another.
- Resources for an application do not need to exist in the same resource group. However, it is recommended that you keep them in the same resource group for ease of management.
What is the Azure Resource Manager
Azure Resource Manager is a management layer in which resource groups and all the resources within it are created, configured, managed, and deleted. It provides a consistent management layer which allows you automate the deployment and configuration of resources using different automation and scripting tools, such as Microsoft Azure PowerShell, Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI), Azure portal, REST API, and client SDKs.
Name some things you can do with the Resource Manager.
- Deploy Application resources. Update, manage, and delete all the resources for your solution in a single, coordinated operation
- Organize resources. Manage your infrastructure through declarative templates rather than scripts.
- Control access and resources. You can control who in your organization can perform actions on the resources.
What is Azure compute?
Azure compute is an on-demand computing service for running cloud-based applications. It provides computing resources such as disks, processors, memory, networking and operating systems.
What are two of the most common compute services in Azure?
Virtual machines and containers.
What are Virtual Machines (VMs)?
Virtual machines, (VMs), are software emulations of physical computers. They include a virtual processor, memory, storage, and networking resources. They host an operating system, and you’re able to install and run software just like a physical computer.
What are Virtual machine scale sets?
Virtual machine scale sets are an Azure compute resource that you can use to deploy and manage a set of identical VMs. With all VMs configured the same, VM scale sets are designed to support true auto-scale—no pre-provisioning of VMs is required—and as such makes it easier to build large-scale services targeting big compute, big data, and containerized workloads
What can you do with App services?
With App services, you can quickly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade web, mobile, and API apps running on any platform. You can meet rigorous performance, scalability, security and compliance requirements while using a fully managed platform to perform infrastructure maintenance. App Services is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering.
What can you do with Azure Functions?
Azure Functions are ideal when you’re concerned only about the code running your service and not the underlying platform or infrastructure. They’re commonly used when you need to perform work in response to an event (often via a REST request), timer, or message from another Azure service, and when that work can be completed quickly, within seconds or less.
What are containers?
Containers are a virtualization environment.
- Containers reference the operating system of the host environment that runs the container.
- Unlike virtual machines you do not manage the operating system.
- Containers are lightweight and are designed to be created, scaled out, and stopped dynamically.
- Containers allows you to respond to changes on demand and quickly restart in case of a crash or hardware interruption.
What are the two ways to manage both Docker and Microsoft-based containers in Azure?
- Azure Container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure without having to manage any virtual machines or adopt any additional services. It is a PaaS offering that allows you to upload your containers, which it will run for you.
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a complete orchestration service for containers with distributed architectures and large volumes of containers. Orchestration is the task of automating and managing a large number of containers and how they interact.
What is Azure Networking?
Azure Networking allows you to connect cloud and on-premises infrastructure and services to provide your customers and users the best possible experience.
What is Azure Virtual Network?
Azure Virtual Network enables many types of Azure resources such as Azure VMs to securely communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. A virtual network is scoped to a single region; however, multiple virtual networks from different regions can be connected using virtual network peering. With Azure Virtual Network you can provide isolation, segmentation, communication with on-premises and cloud resources, routing and filtering of network traffic.
What is Azure Load Balancer?
Azure Load Balancer can provide scale for your applications and create high availability for your services. Load Balancer supports inbound and outbound scenarios, provides low latency and high throughput, and scales up to millions of flows for all Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) applications. You can use Load Balancer with incoming internet traffic, internal traffic across Azure services, port forwarding for specific traffic, or outbound connectivity for VMs in your virtual network.
What is VPN Gateway?
A VPN gateway is a specific type of virtual network gateway that is used to send encrypted traffic between an Azure Virtual Network and an on-premises location over the public internet. It provides a more secure connection from on-premises to Azure over the internet.
